“Get out,” she said, without conviction.
“Listen,” Black Mike said, “it’s going to be okay. You just wait. You’re just scared.” Black Mike’s hand was at White Mike’s back, a dark starfish, and he guided him out of the apartment. Janice dropped her cigarette in a plastic cup of leftover vodka and orange juice. She left the front door open behind her.
Later that afternoon, after Religions and Ethics class, Avery and Leah followed her to the Bourbon Street Villas. Lance hadn’t shown up at class, but she’d seen him in the commons area, smoking and talking with friends. When she’d walked past—wearing her sunglasses, her eyes swollen—he’d ignored her. She didn’t notice Avery and Leah until she was parking her Honda Accord in slot number two.
Leah drove a white Mitsubishi truck, Avery in the passenger seat with her arm out the window. Rosie looked away, pretending she hadn’t noticed. Leah pulled into slot number four, but there was a screeching sound as she pulled out again, after reading the warning sign: TENANTS ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED.
Rosie walked past Christina’s wind chimes, a hummingbird at the feeder, suspended like a tiny helicopter, and behind it, the shadow of Christina moving through her kitchen. Rosie closed her front door and turned on her television as a distraction. The show was Sally Jessy Raphael and the subject: My Daughter Is a Teenage Lush. A mother shouted at her daughter, and Sally Jessy Raphael looked bemused.
“You’re a slut!” the mother yelled.
Thuds came from her front door and she turned off the television. Through the peephole, she saw the dark blue of Leah’s shirt.
“Open up,” Leah said.
“We just want to talk,” Avery added.
She unhooked the chain on her door, deciding to believe Avery, but before she turned the doorknob, the door swung open.
“Are you afraid?” Leah asked. They moved inside and she backed up. Leah scared her the most since she was tall and naturally mean.
Leah turned to shut the door, but Christina stood in the doorway, wearing a pantsuit with a safari pattern and a red scarf tied dramatically around her neck. Rosie recognized it as the scarf from the lampshade.
Although she was Christina, the way she stood at the doorway, legs wide, face angry, she looked more like Joe. “What’s going on?” she said, voice gruff and businesslike.
“They’re from school. They just want to talk.”
“Mind if I stay?” Christina walked into the apartment and sat on the couch, crossing one leg over the other. She wore sandals with turquoise rocks embedded in the leather straps.
Leah laughed but sounded nervous.
“Well,” Christina said, her arms spreading along the back of the couch.
Leah tried to look disgusted, shaking her head. “Let’s go,” she said, tugging Avery’s arm. “Lance is my boyfriend,” she added sadly, not looking at Rosie. She walked to the front door, Avery following. After the door closed, Rosie looked over to Christina, who raised her eyebrows disapprovingly.
Christina got her birthday kiss that night. She’d bought her own belated birthday cake at Albertsons supermarket, and Rosie presented it to her, lights off, candles twinkling: Happy Birthday Christina in dark blue frosting. Christina wore a shoulder-length thick black wig with red highlights, one that Rosie hadn’t seen before, and when Rosie complimented her, she said, “It’s my Tina Turner wig.” She wore red silk pajama pants and a matching long-sleeved button down top. Her wedge-heeled slippers were open-toed so that Rosie could see that she’d painted her toenails a matching magenta red.
They sat at Christina’s small kitchen table, wearing cone-shaped party hats. Christina had tucked the rubber band at the back of her head behind her wig, hat propped forward on her forehead, reminding Rosie of a unicorn. When she asked Christina about her family, Christina said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and for a flash, in her hostile tone, she was Joe. Christina took off her party hat, setting it on the table, and Rosie did the same. Through the kitchen window beyond the wind chimes, the moon was smeared inside a cloud. When Bronco jumped on the table, Christina didn’t shoo him, and she rubbed his head as he licked frosting from her plate. “That’s my sweetie,” she said, and Bronco regarded her with a blue stained mouth.
Christina kissed her. They sat on the couch. It was a long kiss, the stubble from Christina’s face rough on her skin; she kept her eyes closed. In her mind, Joe/Christina flipped back and forth from the deep-voiced, black-haired, chain-smoking, misanthropic, brooding, mechanic male to the multiply bewigged, sensitive, heavily made-up, heartbreakingly lonely, exhibitionist, and talkative female. Later, she would think about her own rebellion: some of it was good and necessary; most of it was awful and relentless. Her actions and motivations were mixed so that she couldn’t tell the difference. She didn’t want to die, and what scared her most was that she was crossing lines, taking herself further down, coming closer and closer to fucking up for good.
Christina’s hands were on Rosie’s knees and Christina leaned into the kiss. Her tongue was large and Rosie wanted it to end. When Christina finished, she leaned back, elbows crooked, hands behind her head. Her head went back, eyes closed, and her Adam’s apple swelled.
Rosie thought of all the times Christina could have taken advantage of her: The blackouts when Christina put her to sleep; the times she took her keys out of the door; how she stared the men away. Christina was the first gentleman she’d kissed. It was the least she could do, but when Christina got out her Polaroid camera, she drew the line at a photo shoot.
They settled for one photograph, sitting together on the couch. Christina applied a fresh coat of lipstick and handed her the lipstick tube. Christina put her arm out, camera in hand, and they tilted their heads together. There was a bright flash. The camera spat out the photo and Christina wagged it between her long fingernails. She set it on the coffee table, and they watched their faces emerge from the square of greenish brown chemicals. Their eyes were at half-mast, reacting to the flash so that they both looked drunk. Although they were smiling, they looked sad, each in her unique way. Their lipstick colors matched, and there was a fleck of magenta on Rosie’s front tooth.
The Morning After
JOHN WAYNE STRETCHES his legs in the leather passenger seat. The black Mercedes is parked high atop the hill of Newport Cemetery, at the end of Marguerite. Sparkling and clear, the way it can only appear after a hard rain, the view extends beyond the graves to the flower streets and homes, and farther still, toward ocean and sky. From the rearview mirror, he sees his skateboard in the back seat, and he wants to hear its wheels against the street, but he knows that Henry Wilson will take an hour at least.
Wilson doesn’t drive him to the Newport Inn anymore, although he pays for a room. Wilson doesn’t want to fuck him or touch him. He still gives him money, but ever since the boating accident, less than a year ago, Wilson only makes him sit in the Mercedes. He knows Wilson thinks it’s his fault for letting him use the boat.
That afternoon, as he untied Wilson’s sixteen-foot Boston Whaler and started the engine, sun danced on the water. Wilson had let him use the boat only once before. He saw clouds, a hint of gray weighting their bases, and a pelican flying low, its wings skimming the bay. On the other side of the bay was Grandma Dot’s house—he imagined her at her barstool, playing Solitaire, setting the cards down slowly, indifferently, a cigarette burning in her glass ashtray. Every now and then, he sleeps in Uncle Stan’s room, but ever since Grandpa caught him coming down the stairs and installed an electronic alarm system, he’s careful, although he knows they never turn it on.
John Wayne backed the boat from its slip, and there was a plunk—at first he thought a fish had jumped near him. Another one came, a flashing white and splash. He turned to see Wilson at his deck, sun casting a glow over him, his arms swinging a golf club back in an arc. His club paused for a smooth second and clacked as he made contact. Wilson’s hand went up to shade his eyes, and even from a distance, there was an admi
ssion of unhappiness in his grin.
John Wayne drove beyond the flying golf balls, and when he neared the jetty, he increased his speed. Wisps of water hit his arm. Beyond the jetty, the hull of the boat rose on the swells and thumped down with a noise like a crack, as if the boat would split. He went faster, hair thrashing behind him, gut smacking with the hull, rattling his bones, clattering his teeth. His tooth pendant swung on the chain behind him and tapped steadily between his shoulder blades. The red kill switch danced loose, hit his thigh, and he let his fingers graze the steering wheel, as if he were flying without direction. The wheel jerked to the right, spinning quickly against his fingertips with a humming noise.
The boat made a sharp turn and he was tossed; his ankle hit the side of the boat; he saw sky, the edge of a cloud, and ocean. And then he opened his eyes underwater but couldn’t see. The sound of the motor vibrated loudly, coming closer. When his head came out of the water, the blades of the motor spun as if in slow motion, and he pushed with his right hand, a blade slicing his palm. But the boat circled—the steering wheel had stuck hard to the right, and it came again. He curled his body protectively and pressed with his left foot, blade cutting through the sole of his foot, and then his left hand. His blood blended with the sea making the water around him purplish. Dog paddling, trying to extend beyond the motor, he took one last hit with his right foot. The motor vibrated in his chest, but he was beyond its reach, floating, fading in and out of consciousness.
When he was pulled from the water by his underarms and set against the solid floor of another boat, he thought he was still in the ocean, weaving with the current like seaweed. He couldn’t understand what the voices said, and then he imagined himself napping in the hazy sunlight on the bench by the Newport Marriott water fountain, while people moved busily around him.
The same nurse that took care of him when he broke his arm skateboarding took care of him now. She tried to explain what the doctors had done. Pins and needles in his hands and feet. He would need physical therapy, of course, a few minutes more and he would’ve bled to death; there’d been a blood transfusion; he would have S-shaped scars on his palms and the soles of his feet, the motion of a propeller blade lined in his skin forever.
An anonymous donor had paid his hospital bill in full, she said. There was no need to worry about that. He saw tenderness and sorrow in her eyes and he smiled. His soul extended beyond his body, and he gave from it as smoothly as a wave cresting and reaching, knowing that it always came back.
Wilson sits in the driver’s seat, adjusting the car stereo. His fingertips are yellow from smoking. His shirt is a creamy cotton material, the top button undone, and the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple is a coarser tan than the rest of his neck. Sharp creases run down the front of his slacks, and he wears leather loafers without socks. He looks up from his car stereo. “What a view, what a view,” he says, sliding his hands along the material of his slacks. He usually talks about his divorce, his adult children, his fiancée, his computer software business, and sometimes his younger brother, Theo, who committed suicide; but when he talks about Theo, he changes the subject abruptly “Put your seat down,” he says, lowering his own seat. “I want you to hear this with your head back.”
John Wayne lowers his seat and adjusts his head on the headrest. The tinted sunroof is closed, fingerprints and thumbprints smeared across the glass. The music is swooping and filled with melancholy. His spirit moves in the chaos of his conjurings. He remembers walking on the wet sand at night, feet sinking, his dark footprints pooling with seawater, dissolving. He imagines fingerprints across his soul, from letting others handle him—the reaching and touching.
“Goddamn it,” Wilson says, reacting to the sunroof as well, pressing a button to open it. “Those Mexicans left fingerprints when I got my car washed this morning.”
Dusky gold and red cover the sky as John Wayne gets dropped off near the Ugly House. He holds his skateboard against his thighs and listens to the sleek car’s engine until it’s gone, and then he hears the sound of ocean carrying across the night. And beyond, the rustling fronds of palm trees, and if he concentrates even more, the wind itself.
The drug dealer lives on Balboa Island; by the dimming sun, Rosie guesses it’s around four or five in the afternoon. She’s been partying with Janice Faslender since ten that morning. Janice Faslender, daughter of the mayor. When her father was mayor, Janice passed out shirts with lettering across the front: I PARTIED WITH THE MAYOR’S DAUGHTER. Rosie didn’t know her then, but she likes the story, and thinks of that Janice as more heroic than the Janice who lives in her apartment complex near Orange Coast College, who doesn’t care about anything other than getting loaded, whom men make fun of, right in front of her, but then linger because she’s that easy, and they know it’s only a matter of waiting.
She remembers pieces of the day: the windows of Janice’s Toyota Corolla were down, sky sparkling and bright from the previous night’s rainfall, and Janice’s hair whipped in her face, a strand stuck in her mouth. Janice opened a bottle of Coors on a bottle opener she’d attached to her dashboard, one hand on the steering wheel; she drove, tipping the bottleneck to her lips. After finishing, she set her arm outside her window—bottleneck loosely in fingertips—and lightly tossed it. Something about the nonchalance struck Rosie as sexy. They heard it shatter. Rosie finished her bottle and briefly considered smashing it on the road, but settled for placing it on the car floor, where it rolled back and forth with the momentum of the car, knocking against her feet.
While peeing in an alleyway, Janice’s fingernails snagged on her nylons, creating a run like a zipper, an inch wide from crotch to toe. Squatting next to Janice, Rosie’s stream made a soft thudding sound, smelling of alcohol, sending up a slight vapor. Next to her, clouds reflected in a leftover rain puddle, a sensation like being upside down, making her feel even more intoxicated—the sky in the ground.
A picket fence surrounded the drug dealer’s small front yard, with a medium-sized trampoline taking up his dead brown lawn. Two young women jumped without enthusiasm on the trampoline. One wore a white bikini and her small breasts bobbed with her jumps.
The drug dealer sat next to Janice on a ratty couch and they passed the pipe back and forth. Rosie sat across from them in a rocking chair, but she kept her feet on the ground to keep from rocking. Janice sucked on the pipe with a raspy intake, held her breath, and then let it out. After each hit, she wanted another. Her face looked pale and the shadows under her eyes were brown. Shirtless, the drug dealer’s chest was hairy; his head hair was dark and curly, like his chest hair. Afghans covered the couches and generic waterfall paintings hung from the walls, as if an old grandma lived in the house. Each time the dealer lit the pipe, the lighter made a chack-chack sound. He tried passing the pipe over the coffee table to her. He flipped the lighter in his other hand, as if it were a coin.
“All right, all right, all right,” he said.
A man came through the back door, and the drug dealer said, “Lobo, the timber wolf—my man.” The man sat on the couch, forcing Janice to squeeze closer to the drug dealer.
Rosie stood from the rocking chair, and although they didn’t say anything, she felt everyone’s eyes on her back as she walked to the front door. She noticed that she was sweating while she walked—her whole body was wet.
She’s at least a half-mile from the drug dealer’s house, still walking. A fresh bruise on her forearm catches her attention, what Janice would call a mystery bruise, in honor of its unknowable origin, acquired some time during their drinking. The sun is shaped like a bowl, sinking at the horizon. Janice has a name for the hangover-remorse she’ll have tomorrow: The Morning After Sadness.
She thinks about John Wayne. Her high school graduation ceremony was the day of his boating accident, and while she stood in line in her cap and gown waiting to cross the stage and shake hands with her vice principal—drunk from the warm bottle of Smirnoff she kept stored in her locker—she sensed somet
hing terribly wrong and began to weep.
Iris, Jasmine, Larkspur, her fingertips pass over flowers and bushes. She doesn’t want the same future as Janice, and she misses the anticipatory feeling she had as a girl when she thought of her life as full of promise. Because the sun has disappeared and the sky is changing colors, she thinks of Grandma Dot, pausing from her Solitaire and lifting a cigarette from her glass ashtray, not smoking it, but gazing out the sliding glass doors to the same red and gold view.
Rosie hears the clack clack of a skateboard coming closer. A shadow passes, a flash of blond hair. She’s a block from home, near the Ugly House; a row of palm trees strung with lights gives the street a faint glow. Her legs are tired from walking, but the long distance has sobered her, and she’s grateful for a home, since it hasn’t sold yet, and for B. She steps from the sidewalk to the grass, and she knows that it’s John Wayne. It pleases her: like they’re twin ghosts haunting Narcissus.
He comes by again, passing her, and he jumps the curb, one hand holding the skateboard’s edge, the other hand out from his body like he’s riding a bull, his shirt wrapped around him and tied by the long sleeves at his hips. He lands abruptly, flinging the skateboard in the air with his foot. He reaches to catch it, misses. It clangs to the street. His hair is tucked behind his ears and parted haphazardly in a zigzag near the center of his head. The tooth pendant hangs in a white comma below the dark hollow of his clavicle. His chest is hairless, but there’s a golden trail of hair descending from his navel down into his low-slung jeans. He reaches into his pocket, extracts a joint rolled tight and long, and sets it between his lips while he searches his back pocket for his Zippo. The lid makes a click noise as he taps it open and produces a blue flame. He lights the joint and sucks deeply.
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